Eco-Dementia
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Poems inspired by a love of the living world and the actions that destroy what sustains us.
Janet Kauffman describes "eco-dementia" as a paradoxical condition of humanity—possessing a love of the living world while simultaneously causing and suffering from its destruction. Like other dementias, losses are profound. We lose touch, we forget. We don't recognize our own home—the habitat that sustains us. What has driven us to exploit more and more resources, even when risking self-annihilation? Eco-dementia is not nature poetry but an immersive language in the tangle of the living world that asks the question: can we survive this relationship?
The poems in Eco-dementia took shape in one decade of the author's life. In three sections, Kauffman reflects on insanities and devastations, from the personal to the global. From her father's Alzheimer's and the ravaged world of his mind to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, and toxins in Lake Erie, as well as the planetary-wide ecological catastrophe of climate change. Yet despite this devastation, it is possible to surround ourselves in light and air, to touch the tall grasses we love, to step into water and shade and feel an intense, momentary joy. Kauffman's poems show the bliss within the elemental richness of the natural world and also the violent distortions and grief at its devastation. Like learning a new language, we can see and hear words, sometimes understanding so clearly and other times not at all. Or as Kauffman's father puts it, "I know where you live, but I don't know who you are."
The language of these poems is the physical material of a damaged world. Readers of modern and experimental poetry will treasure this collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this experimental ode to an impending apocalypse, Kauffman (Trespassing) surveys the toxic relationship between humankind and the natural world via eerie portents and striking imagery. She asserts in the title poem that "time has taken us far too far for scattershot revelations or shortcuts," implying that it may be too late to set things right again ecologically. The collection is permeated with anxiety. The images, such as a child's doll caught in a flood, are haunting and occasionally disturbing: "black and white cows/ on swollen knees in the warehouse." Species limp pitifully toward extinction; gnats that "carried away the small shadows" barely register to humans as missing. Kauffman's use of language varies from obtuse to enchantingly musical: "An elaboration of stalk/ and stilts, Angelica leans,/ she tilts, cantilevers." An oblique lack of subtlety is evident in such lines as "A warring machine/ flexes, exploding/ bird song." A combination of these characteristics works to advance Kauffman's theme and atmosphere of general hopelessness. Late in the collection, she explores more fantastical terrain, featuring naiads and a magic wand made from witch hazel and "sprouts of pig hair." These poems are cast as a message from a future in which environmental devastation has advanced to an irreversible and frightening degree, a prescient warning and spirited depiction of yearning for lost beauty.
